The invention relates to the compression of triangulated data structures.
Objects can be defined in terms of faces formed of tessellated triangles. The triangles are typically defined in terms of the positions of the vertices, one or more normals at the vertices, the vectors connecting the vertices and the normals to the faces formed by the triangles.
Such tessellated data structures can be used to define complex objects that comprise very many such triangles. Especially for a large object, a large volume of data is typically required to define the object.
There is a need, therefore, to provide for the compression of such data. In order to enable a significant compression of data, it is to be expected that some loss of information may occur. However, it would be desirable that the compression is achieved in a re-writable manner so that the data structure can be stored and retrieved multiple times without further degradation of the information.
An embodiment of the present invention seeks to provide for rewritable compression of triangulated data structures.